Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a technology for protecting rights of digital contents. As the Internet has been popularized and digital contents have been actively distributed, illegal copy and unauthorized use of digital contents have been at issue. In order to protect the digital contents from the illegal copy and unauthorized use, a digital rights management (DRM) technology was introduced. The DRM technology was used to prevent illegal copying of contents such as music files, video files, and electric books. Lately, the DRM technology has been used in various fields for protecting digital contents, such as, mobile, document security, and digital broadcasting. The applicable field of the DRM technology has been expanding for providing various services such as contents production, contents management, contents distribution, and payment management.
However, the conventional DRM technology was incapable of accommodating and managing digital contents with DRMs of different services and different manufacturers applied thereto together because it cannot unify heterogeneous DRMs provided from various manufacturers.
In order to accommodate and managing heterogeneous DRMs in one platform in the conventional DRM technology, DRM information applied to contents should be analyzed, and tool agent modules used for each of DRMs should be loaded for performing copyright protection according to content protection information.
The above described DRM processes were performed in a contents consuming terminal, and a manufacturer of a terminal had burden to embody a DRM processing module for each terminal in order to perform the DRM processing processes in a terminal.